Category: Folk Rock

Folk rock is a music genre combining elements of folk music and rock music. In its earliest and narrowest sense, the term referred to a genre that arose in the United States and the United Kingdom around the mid-1960s. The genre was pioneered by the Los Angeles band the Byrds, who began playing traditional folk music and songs by Bob Dylan with rock instrumentation. The term “folk rock” was coined by the U.S. music press to describe the Byrds’ music in June 1965, the month in which the band’s debut album was issued.

The release of the Byrds’ 1965 cover version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and its subsequent commercial success, along with Dylan’s own recordings with rock instrumentation—on the albums Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and Blonde on Blonde (1966)—initiated an explosion of folk rock groups in the mid-1960s. Dylan’s appearance at the Newport Folk Festival on 25 July 1965, with an electric band backing him, was also a pivotal moment in the development of the genre.

A distinct, eclectic style of electric folk was created in Britain and Europe in the late 1960s by Pentangle, Fairport Convention and Alan Stivell. Inspired by British psychedelic folk and the North American style of folk rock, Pentangle, Fairport, and other related bands began to incorporate elements of traditional British folk music into their repertoire. Fairport bassist Ashley Hutchings formed Steeleye Span with traditionalist folk musicians who wished to incorporate overt rock elements into their music, and this led to other variants, including the overtly English folk rock of the Albion Band (also featuring Hutchings) and the more prolific current of Celtic rock.

In a broader sense, folk rock includes later similarly inspired musical genres and movements in the English-speaking world.

Woods was a part of a large collective of groups that I discovered around the same time, there was an article with the best alt bands of the year I studied meticulously and came out with a few gems, other bands included in said list were: Grouplove, Gotye, Bombay Bicycle Club, and Arctic Monkeys. Woods stands out from the list by their unique sound, as if you’ve been transported to a dystopian New Mexico and have only the gun on your side and the clothes on your back. Woods shines in not sticking to the traditional sound, while not trying anything overly experimental either. City Sun Eater In The River Of Light flows nicely from track to track without begging for too much attention, it’s a chill album to listen to while trying to scrounge up food while keeping an eye out for our future robot overlords.